All The Proof You Need

Last year Jack Cashill, a blogger at American Thinker, presented iron-clad proof that former Weatherman and Obama ally William Ayers actually ghost-wrote Barack Obama's book Dreams of My Father. His proof? There are a lot of similar words in that book and in books written by commie-pinko-DFH Ayers.

Although there are only the briefest of literal sea experiences in Dreams, the following words appear in both Dreams and in Ayers' work: fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky.

There's also the shared use of the words "a", "and", and "the".

Now Mr. Cashill has more evidence.

Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, eyes "like ice," and people who are "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed."

As it happens, Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes. He also writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, and uses the phrases "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed." Obama adds "smoldering eyes," "smoldering" being a word that he and Ayers inject repeatedly. Obama also uses the highly distinctive phrase "like ice," in his case to describe the glinting of the stars.

The smoking gun, however, is that both Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers misquote Carl Sandburg's poem, "Chicago":

From Dreams:

He poured himself more hot water. "What do you know about Chicago anyway?"

I thought a moment. "Hog butcher to the world," I said finally.

From Parent [Ayers' book]:

"At the turn of the century, Chicago had a population of a million people and was a young and muscular city - hub of commerce and industry, the first skyscraper city, home of the famous world exposition, "hog butcher to the world" - bursting with energy."

This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote "Chicago," and they do so in exactly the same way. The poem actually opens, "Hog butcher for the world."

Well, whaddaya know; that's how I thought the poem started, too, even though I memorized it for my eighth grade English class in 1967. I guess that's proof that the terrorist Weathermen were already infiltrating the depths of our society, going so far as to reach their tendrils into the minds of middle-school students in Toledo, Ohio, and pervert their learning of a great poem by a great American. Oh, the perfidy.

On the other hand, it's fine with me that folks like Mr. Cashill are obsessed with trivial crap such as this rather than care about anything that might actually matter.

HT to Hilzoy.

Cross-posted.